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164 Interview with Kathryn Bigelow Ryan Stewart / 2009 From Slant, June 26, 2009. Reprinted by permission of Slant. “There’s a price for that kind of heroism,” Kathryn Bigelow says of The Hurt Locker’s lead character, an ingenious Army grunt who stares bombs in the face for his daily bread and who slowly comes to appreciate the immense toll that such death-defying work takes on the psyche. Depictions of men under nerve-melting pressure are frequent in Bigelow’s famously kinetic oeuvre, which spans two decades and includes the deliriously inventive cowboy-vampire pastiche Near Dark and the darkly spiritual surf saga Point Break, but rarely have form and favored subject been so expertly harmonized as in Hurt Locker. Earlier this week, the director called me up to discuss the film and those who inspired it. A master class in experiential action cinema from one of its most learned professors, this barely-fictionalized, ground-level look at the U.S. Army’s Explosive Ordnance Disposal technicians is so immersive that it’s practically tactile, a work of exhaustive filmic intricacy that required Bigelow to contemplate even “the sound of heat and dust, and the sun,” as she tells it. Slant: I was just reading an old magazine interview you gave for Strange Days, in which you said, “As our society progresses, genuine experience becomes riskier and the desire for it increases.” The context for that was virtual reality, of course, but doesn’t it also sort of explain why someone would volunteer to diffuse bombs? Kathryn Bigelow: Very, very interesting question, and I would say that it’s hard to generalize why a person would choose Explosive Ordnance Disposal. Also, just to back up a bit, one has to be invited into the Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit after you’ve decided that you’re ryan stewar t / 2009 165 going to pursue the military. My understanding is that there are all these aptitude tests to take first and then, if you’ve scored extremely highly, you can be invited into the EOD. So, it’s a pretty rarified world that these EOD techs exist in, and I’m not sure, but my humble opinion is that it’s way more complicated than that. These are men who, as you indicated, have gone into this profession by choice, and it’s perhaps the most dangerous job in the world. They have volunteered and every single day they go out there, sometimes at the risk—the peril—of a potential sacrifice of their own, and they are saving thousands of lives by disarming or at least rendering safe these explosive ordnances. Slant: And they’re affected by it in varying degrees, of course. You gave Jeremy Renner’s lead bomb tech character this quality of implacable cheeriness, an imperviousness to danger that unnerves his colleagues and keeps them distant from him. Do you think there’s some correlation between anti-social tendencies and the job itself, which seemingly no normal person would do? KB: I don’t really have the stats to make that sort of assessment, but I definitely think that it takes a very, very courageous individual, certainly a very brave one, and there was a comment that [screenwriter] Mark Boal made when he came back from his embed; he said that courage is not the absence of fear, it’s maintaining your sense of humor in the face of fear. The job itself, this profession, is so inherently dangerous, and yet it does happen to be at the epicenter of this particular conflict, and I think that it takes a pretty extraordinary human being to do it, one who is perhaps a very complicated psychological mix. So, I think it would be hard for me to give you a compact answer. I wouldn’t hazard one since I’m not a psychologist . Nonetheless, we did certainly show some other bomb techs; there is a myriad of psychologies and personalities there, and they’ve all decided to do this job. Slant: As someone who strives to create immersive cinema, did you find it necessary to get into the headspace of these guys and share their experiences ? I heard that you tried to cross the border into Iraq. KB: Well, the genesis of the piece was Mark Boal’s embed, as you know, in Baghdad in 2004, with a bomb squad. So, it began as a piece of reporting and my feeling as a filmmaker was that I really...

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